Can Gordon Moore Save the Amazon? / Intel's founder is donating heavily to protect the jungle -- but even some beneficiaries say the money is misspent

Robert Collier

Published
4:00 am PST, Sunday, November 19, 2006

The Inter-Oceanic Highway in southeast Peru crosses the Andes at over 14,000 feet in altitude and drops into the Amazon basin more than 13,000 feet below. The Peruvian government is currently converting this dirt road to a major highway to allow transport of cattle, soybeans, minerals and other exports from Brazil to Peru�s Pacific coast and from there to the Far East. Photo by Heather Sarantis/Special to The Chronicle less

The Inter-Oceanic Highway in southeast Peru crosses the Andes at over 14,000 feet in altitude and drops into the Amazon basin more than 13,000 feet below. The Peruvian government is currently converting this ... more

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The Inter-Oceanic Highway in southeast Peru crosses the Andes at over 14,000 feet in altitude and drops into the Amazon basin more than 13,000 feet below. The Peruvian government is currently converting this dirt road to a major highway to allow transport of cattle, soybeans, minerals and other exports from Brazil to Peru�s Pacific coast and from there to the Far East. Photo by Heather Sarantis/Special to The Chronicle less

The Inter-Oceanic Highway in southeast Peru crosses the Andes at over 14,000 feet in altitude and drops into the Amazon basin more than 13,000 feet below. The Peruvian government is currently converting this ... more

Can Gordon Moore Save the Amazon? / Intel's founder is donating heavily to protect the jungle -- but even some beneficiaries say the money is misspent

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It was proof of a crime against nature, the desecration of a national park. A backhoe and bulldozer were parked casually amid dozens of acres of bare earth where virgin jungle had recently stood. Thick hoses snaked down to a gully, where a team of men blasted the dirt with torrents of water, seeking to flush out specks of gold.

Dario Flores, the top ranger of Peru's Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, stomped over to the miners. But he didn't lay down the law. He begged.

"This is the third time that we've been here," he said, as another ranger behind him kicked at a rock. "Please tell your boss that he can't be mining here. You should move out. If you go, we won't be bothering you any more. Please."

"Sure, we'll tell him," one worker said, grinning, as he kept swinging his pick into the rushing mud and stones.

Flores turned and trudged away. As he walked, he explained wearily that he had no way of expelling the miners. "If we ask the police to come enforce the law, they tell us to pay for their transportation, their per diems, their food," he said. "That's a lot of money, and we don't have enough budget for that."

Across the Amazon, the battle to save the primeval jungle continues to be a losing one. Mining, logging, ranching and farming are expanding at an anarchic pace, little constrained by government authorities who are often unable or unwilling to crack down.

At the same time, the international environmental movement is spending larger and larger sums to protect the Amazon. This battle is being led by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation of San Francisco, which since its founding in 2000 has become the world's largest non-governmental donor for forest protection and other conservation efforts.

The foundation, created by Intel Corp. founder Gordon Moore, has spent nearly $200 million in the Amazon, and almost $1 billion elsewhere.

Yet this largesse appears to have contributed to a deepening gap between weak, underfunded government efforts and well-heeled nonprofit groups.

The contrast is on vivid display about 100 miles to the north of Bahuaja-Sonene park. At Los Amigos Conservation Concession, a 360,000-acre tract of wilderness, Moore money has helped create one of the world's pre-eminent tropical research stations. Wildlife biologists and other scientists from the United States, Peru and elsewhere carry out elaborate research studies, aided by expensive infrastructure such as a planned wireless Internet network over the jungle that will allow remote data collection and transmission.

The Los Amigos preserve, which is under indefinite concession from the Peruvian government, has annual operating and research expenses of about $510,000. The 2.7-million-acre Bahuaja-Sonene has an annual budget of $50,000.

As of September, the foundation had donated or committed $129 million to projects in the Amazon, plus $314 million to one single group, Conservation International, which has spent more than one-fifth of those funds in the Amazon. By some estimates, the foundation supplies as much as one-quarter of all money spent by environmental groups throughout the Amazon basin.

Flores' boss, park Superintendent Ricardo Woolcott, admits to some envy. "What couldn't I do with the kind of money that Moore gives away?" he asked. "I could hire more than the two rangers I have. I could pay for police."

He needs the money now more than ever, he said. "There's more and more illegal mining and logging all around the edges of the park, and more is coming with that highway," he said.

Woolcott was referring to the Inter-Oceanic Highway, a $900 million, 700-mile paved road linking western Brazil to ports on Peru's Pacific coast. The Peruvian government is pushing forward with its construction, which began earlier this year and is expected to finish in 2009.

Until now, the far west of the Amazon basin has remained largely immune from the development pressures affecting other parts of the region, where good highways exist to take minerals, lumber and beef to Atlantic Ocean shipping ports. From the far west, hauling products 2,000 miles by truck to the Atlantic has been unprofitable, with the only outlet to the Pacific an often-impassable dirt track zigzagging into the snow-capped Andes.

Just several miles from where Flores and Woolcott were visiting the illegal mine, more bulldozers were at work on the highway, widening, flattening and scraping away mountainsides. When the project is finished in three years, trucks will be able to go from the Amazon to Pacific ports in less than two days.

Environmentalists describe the opening of this passage to the Pacific in dire terms. They say the jungle region from northern Bolivia into Peru, which is believed to hold the world's richest variety of plant and animal species, could be transformed over the next century into a giant supply zone for China and other Far Eastern nations, exporting lumber, beef, soy, citrus, minerals and other products. Also expected is a wave of migration by poor indigenous people from the highlands, as well as an acceleration in the already fast-expanding cultivation of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine.

"The opening of the highway will add huge economic pressures to the process of deforestation," said Juan Carlos Flores, director of Amazon Conservation Association in Puerto Maldonado, the largest town in Peru's southern Amazon region. "Think of it -- the purchasing power of those growing economies in Asia is a historical force that will be almost impossible to resist." Flores' association is one of several environmental groups that are trying to reduce the impact of the highway opening. Much of the funding for these groups comes from one organization -- the Moore Foundation.

"Moore has changed the face of fundraising for environmental programs," said Michael Painter, regional coordinator for the Amazon and central Andes for the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York, which has received Moore funds. "It has made a whole level of resources available that never would have been thinkable before."

Saving the Amazon is but one of the priorities of the Moore Foundation, which has $5 billion in assets. Other programs include protection of the northern Pacific salmon fisheries (Gordon Moore is an avid fisherman) and the Bay Area's nursing profession.

From its headquarters in the Presidio, the Moore Foundation has drawn praise and controversy. Its ability to make grant-seeking organizations bow and scrape to its requests, its decision to give so much money to one already well-financed organization (Conservation International, based in Washington), and its self-proclaimed corporate style have rubbed some environmentalists the wrong way.

"We don't try to do everything, but what we do we do with a great deal of focus and deliberateness," said Bill Green, the foundation's chief counsel and director of its environmental programs.

Like most Moore senior executives, Green, a former Chiron Corp. chief attorney, had no full-time work experience in environmental issues before he started at the foundation.

Green said the foundation is motivated by scientific studies it had commissioned that predict an irreversible tipping point for the Amazon basin, which currently has about 800,000 square miles of forest cover. Scientists have determined that if this virgin area drops below 370,000 square miles, the entire region's climate will change, and hundreds of plant and animal species endemic to the zone will disappear.

But for many inhabitants of the western Amazon, change can't come quickly enough.

In Brazil's Acre state, which borders Peru and Bolivia, the government has already paved its section of the Inter-Oceanic Highway. The flat land on either side has been converted to cattle ranches, with only a few gangly tall trees here and there as remnants of the thick jungle that existed a decade before.

Brazil has built an ultra-modern bridge over the Acre River, which divides the two nations, and a large new customs house is awaiting the long-haul trucking traffic soon to come.

Brazilian business leaders are readying for the boom. "In the very near future we will be exporting to China, and this future is enormous," said Jose Luiz, president of the Alto Acre Chamber of Commerce. He noted that Acre has 2.3 million head of cattle, as well as large rice and corn farms. He predicted that the state "very soon" will start growing soybeans, a crop much grown in Rondonia and Mato Grosso states to the south and much desired by China.

Along the Inter-Oceanic Highway route, the Amazon Conservation Association and other Moore-funded groups are hard at work -- holding workshops and drawing up planning studies to prepare for the highway; funding and training cooperatives of growers of Brazil nuts, which grow on trees scattered in the virgin forests; and helping indigenous groups develop ecotourism lodges.

Officials involved say that while the Brazilian government has strengthened its forest protection policies somewhat in recent years, Peru and Bolivia are doing little.

"The completion of the highway will create great indirect impacts, but the Peruvian government is extremely disorganized and its local institutions are very fragile," said Elsa Mendoza, a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Research for the Amazon in Rio Branco, Acre's capital city.

Mendoza heads a task force of government and nonprofit agency officials from Brazil, Peru and Bolivia that is planning programs to mitigate the environmental impacts of the highway. She admits that despite repeated meetings and blueprints, the planning process is "extremely ineffective."

Mendoza spoke bitterly of Peruvian officials' lack of response to the Andean Development Corp., a multilateral bank that loaned Peru most of the $900 million cost of building the highway and obliged Peru to spend $17 million on environmental mitigation planning.

Zoning regulations that call for most of Peru's jungle Madre de Dios province to be protected or managed under ecologically sustainable principles have not been codified into law, and in any case, enforcement is nil.

"So far, there's no indication that the money will be used for what was promised, or that the government will put up its share," said Alfredo Ferreyros, director of Conservation International's Peru office. "If not, people will laugh in the face of the government. As you say in Texas, you've got to walk the talk."

Among Peru's businessmen and citizens, the main sentiment toward conservation is derision and hostility.

"The environmentalists care more about monkeys and parrots than humans," said Puerto Maldonado Mayor Eduardo Zabala. "People here don't like them."

That prevailing sentiment was expressed in October 2002, when a mob of loggers and townspeople stormed the Puerto Maldonado offices of the national government's Natural Resources Institute, which oversees parks and the forestry industry, burning the buildings to the ground.

"The foreign environmentalists are all hypocrites," said Luis Zegarra, president of the Federation of Forest Extractors of Madre de Dios, which represents about 700 logging firms in the region that work illegally, without the required permits. "They come here telling us what to do, putting a noose around our necks, while back in their countries they have polluted the atmosphere. Their money here has corrupted many people."

Echoing accusations made widely in the region -- even by environmentalists -- Zegarra said the Natural Resources Institute's system of granting logging permits was hopelessly corrupt, with officials selling permits under the table, permit-holders re-selling their permits, and police allowing trucks with illegal lumber to pass through checkpoints in exchange for bribes.

With the Inter-Oceanic Highway coming soon, Zegarra sees an opportunity. "All the environmentalists should leave here," Zegarra said. "This time, if we're forced, we won't protest in the streets or burn the buildings again. We'll burn the whole forest. If we can't make a living by logging, we'll burn the forest, it will go up in flames, and those environmentalists won't be left with anything anymore."

At the Natural Resources Institute's headquarters in Lima, the nation's capital, officials admit that the system doesn't work. The trafficking of logging permits is "a serious problem, but one that isn't ours alone," said Luis Alfaro Lozano, chief of the national park system. "We have a disarticulated and incoherent government, which is incapable of planning effectively or enacting what it has planned."

Ferreyros, the Conservation International director in Lima, admits that his emphasis on funding expensive scientific research projects has little political benefit.

"We environmentalists like to talk about biodiversity, but it's true that the public doesn't see it as something important," he said. "A lot of our work is in the capacity of component science, funding research that gathers data on endangered species. It's a more medium and long term issue, creating building blocks. Right now, people just don't buy it."

Even among the environmentalists in Peru and elsewhere whose work is affected by the Moore Foundation's money, the question is asked: Just what have all those hundreds of millions of dollars obtained?

At the Moore Foundation's headquarters in the Presidio of San Francisco, the key phrase is "outcomes driven." All projects need to be measured by potential outcomes, with voluminous studies quantifying and calculating the results to the Nth degree.

When asked about the results of the foundation's spending in the Amazon, however, both Green, the environment program director, and Gordon Moore had little to say.

In an interview, Moore said his foundation has improved other foundations' management practices. "Our focus on outcomes has had a significant impact on other organizations, shaping the way they make their (grant) decisions," he said. "I'm not sure we're the sole driver of that, but it's something we've pushed on pretty hard."

Asked whether he has succeeded in helping save the rainforest, he demurred. "Nothing in particular stands out," he said. "You keep chugging away and hope it has an effect."

His programs need more time, he suggested. "You can't measure wins in a five-year time period, and you can't measure losses."

Still, some Moore Foundation allies question its heavy reliance on Conservation International, calling that group cautious and bureaucratic.

"Conservation International has a corporate mentality and they pay corporate-level salaries," said John Terborgh, director of the Center for Tropical Conservation at Duke University, which has received Moore funding. "They don't have a nonprofit mentality. They live high, wide and handsome."

Gordon Moore, who has been a member of Conservation International's board of directors since the 1980s, defends the group. "They've generally been pretty effective," he said.

Many environmentalists compare Moore to Douglas Tompkins, a fellow San Francisco businessman-turned-environmentalist who has spent about $150 million buying land in Chile and Argentina and turning it into public parks. Tompkins' projects have resulted in the protection of about 2 million acres of wilderness, and his vocal, sharp-elbowed advocacy of environmental causes has earned him political enemies in both countries -- but also has shown tangible results.

Moore's programs generally avoid controversy and keep a low public profile, and with the exception of the Los Amigos reserve, little of the foundation's money goes toward locking up specific tracts of land. Instead, most funds are funneled to local conservation groups or given to scientists.

Tompkins praised the foundation, saying "they do a lot of good work." Yet he expressed skepticism about its emphasis on expensive scientific research, saying "75 percent of those studies just gather dust." Tompkins wryly noted that his wealth, which he earned as co-founder of the Esprit clothing company, is dwarfed by Moore's multibillion-dollar fortune.

"Boy, if I had that kind of money, I'd have a couple more national parks, fast," Tompkins said.

Enrique Ortiz, the foundation's senior program manager for the Andes-Amazon region, says the foundation has responded to its critics by becoming less top-heavy. "We have really put a lot of effort into reducing overhead and putting our money into the hands of the people working in the region," Ortiz said. The foundation recently closed its Washington office, and it has pressed Conservation International to cut back its bureaucracy.

Back in the Amazon, the bulldozers keep working on the highway, the trees keep falling and the envy keeps building.

"Unfortunately, many nonprofits have found very comfortable niches, with trips abroad and lots of resources," said Carmela Landeo, superintendent of Tambopata National Reserve, a park next to Bahuaja-Sonene. "The government has many deficiencies, but it has the power to protect or not to protect, to act or not to act. This highway is going through, and we will either do what is needed to mitigate its impacts or we will fail. I wish Moore would put its money to better use."

Green, however, says the foundation should not seek to replace government financing. "We can't duplicate the functions of a government. It's the responsibility of the people of Peru to decide what they want to fund," he said.

For Woolcott, the Bahuaja-Sonene superintendent, the result is strange. "I can't hire more rangers, but next week, I'm being sent to a conference in Lima with all of the country's park superintendents, paid for by the World Wildlife Fund," another Moore grantee. "It will be very nice, we're put up in a fancy hotel, we get a generous per diem," he said.

Woolcott paused, and shrugged. "Imagine how much money we're spending. If I only had a bit of that, I could pay for the police to come and shut down that mine."